I posted this article. I have been an AI practioner since about 1982 and whenever a non-tech friend asks about AI I usually talk about the challenges to society in dealing with a world where only a small number of people need to work to produce enough for everyone.
I think that social challenges will be even greater than the technical challenges.
The robotists will be the new capitalists. The robotists will not only amass wealth but also disproportionate power.
It'll be up to the people to decide how this unnerving issue is resolved.
Will the power of robotics be devolved into the community and be community commons type property or will it remain in private hands thus ensuring a widening gulf between robotists and the rest.
It was back in the seventies with Nixon in power when the specter of a widening wealth gap led to serious consideration of reverse income taxes (the old basic income), we'll have to revisit those ideas.
I also wonder what a more leisure driven lifestyle will lead to. With more time to think, meditate and reflect, will people feel more depressed, will people impact the environment more when it's cheaper, easier a d you have the time to travel anywhere? Will such amenities be rationed so as to minimize impact on ecology?
On the other hand, more time for " mobilization" and such time consuming social engineering schemes.
And what do you think of the social benefits? Is there anything positive to say about AI? If we fully subject ourselves to the machine, will we be happy?
I think it rather depends which machine, but I can certainly think of some useful things to do with highly sophisticated software that would make me, for one, a bunch happier. For instance, if we finally achieved the End of (Wage) Work, I could, ahahaha, finally get some work done. That is, me and everyone else in the research sector could finally focus on actually accomplishing things rather than scrambling for funding.
And on a more personal note, I could probably spend a while going to practically every nerdy-hobby convention in sight. I could probably get through about three before desperately wanting something serious to do. Of course, then I could spend a lot of time on exercise, or lying around on the beach.
Maybe The Terminator and Robocop had a deeper effect on my young psyche than I recognize but what I find truly terrifying is the day when first world nations can completely automate military and law enforcement.
A human being can have internal dialog, "Yes, I know that no one is supposed to be here but I'm not blowing up a building full of toddlers." or "Yes, I know that it's a crime but I'm not going to use deadly force to apprehend someone who was stealing apples to survive." and obviously, machines won't care.
Machine warfare is something so anti-intuitive that my head spins.
How said that watever should be a crime, and why? (Those are much deeper questions than it looks like.) Also, machines can avoid deadly force much better than humans, and apply it better too.
I think after enough casualities we'll settle on some superb law enforcement. More "human" than anything we can imagine today. But the path through there is complicated.
‘Well if I drop out I’m still going to get the same income as everyone else.’
We can observe an experiment we're running in poor areas without jobs, inner city, deep south, appalachia, and around half the students will eventually graduate even if there's no vocational reward for anyone, grads or not.
> Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.
At YC we call these "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas. Imagine one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup. The writers would have to invent something for it to do. But coming up with good startup ideas is hard. It's not something you can do for the asking. So (unless they got amazingly lucky) the writers would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was actually bad. [1]
Indeed, it would be unfortunate to lose your job to a machine, but oftentimes people fail to see the upside: if a robot can do a job more cheaply than a human, then whatever that robot produces is then cheaper for everyone else to buy! If most of the economy were efficiently automated, then you would barely need an income to survive or thrive.
Machines do not decrease your productivity. Just because a machine can make a shoe faster than you doesn't mean you can't make a shoe. If a machine can make houses in a day, that doesn't make your house will spontaneously combust because you made it inefficiently. Labor-saving machines only add to the productivity of society.
People have been losing jobs to tech since the dawn of civilization. It does suck if your job is automated out, but the overall good to society can't be denied.
> If most of the economy were efficiently automated, then you would barely need an income to survive or thrive.
$prices = ($prices * 0.9)
$income = ($income * 0.0)
If most of the benefits from robots flow to the 0.1% who own them, and most of the costs of robots fall on the rest of the population who work for a living, they can be accounted for as a net good to society while being disastrous in practice.
$income goes to zero for that particular person at the time they lose their job, yes, but all of their prices for every good that gets automated goes down. If we repeatedly make everything cheaper, then a low income doesn't matter. Everyone is richer in the sense that a particular good is cheaper.
Also, I very highly doubt that income would reach zero. People wouldn't have to work 40 hours a week, sure, but would everyone just sit around with their thumbs up their butts not knowing how to provide value to others? I think the assertion that all income would go to the rich needs some evidence.
"$income goes to zero for that particular person at the time they lose their job, yes, but all of their prices for every good that gets automated goes down. "
And what good does that do the people who no longer have any income?
"If we repeatedly make everything cheaper, then a low income doesn't matter."
Where are these people getting any income?
"People wouldn't have to work 40 hours a week, sure, but would everyone just sit around with their thumbs up their butts not knowing how to provide value to others?"
I was standing in line at the grocery store last week and overheard a father talking to his son about purchasing some item of candy from the display at the register.
Son (holding up candy): Dad can you get this for me?
Father: No.
Son: It's only a dollar. That's not a lot of money.
The way we do economics depends pretty heavily on there being enough jobs for everyone, or nearly enough anyway. And our culture reinforces this fact (a strong desire to work is honorable, a belief that most work is mostly bullshit is not) which will make it harder for our society to agree to rethink our economics, even if what we're doing is clearly not working. And it doesn't help that our political system seems broken as well, in much of the West.
So yes, the overall good to society can be denied, if it turns out that we aren't smart enough to reap the benefits of our technology, and instead get to watch our economy collapse and our society eat itself, right before the owners of the robots decide to murder the rest of us since we were complaining too much.
> The way we do economics depends pretty heavily on there being enough jobs for everyone...
That's the way many economists interpret the economy, but modern macroeconomics economics can hardly be called an accurate and reliable representation of the real world.
> And our culture reinforces this fact (a strong desire to work is honorable ...
Yes, culture will have to change. But the technological advances are coming an awful lot faster than cultures usually change, historically speaking. And even if we make it through to the other side, it's probably going to be painful.
You act as though the Puritan work ethic is just a thing we can evaluate the efficiency of, and keep or discard based on the results of that evaluation. I wish this were so, but my wishing doesn't make it so.
There are many subcultures. The Puritan ethic is probably quite small these days. A subculture can thrive alongside.
How about this scenario: A rich person builds a town where a new ethic holds sway, using her money to 'fend off' the rest of the world and executing a new model culture, based on automation, creativity and leisure. Folks learn to envy its benefits; the young decide to emulate it. Soon only old Puritans live outside the new plan, in ghettos where they pretend to work and exchange money in a dusty farce of the old economy.
> The way we do economics depends pretty heavily on there being enough jobs for everyone, or nearly enough anyway
The way the current capitalist economy is premised on a vey narrow exclusively capitalist class, and a very broad primarily working class from which the capitalist class extracts value. (While there are some redistributive mechanisms in place, they largely are downward transfers from the more successful members of the working class to the less successful members of that class -- or those that are effectively excluded from participation in either capital or labor because of lack of resources for the former and lack of marketable skills for the latter -- because capital income is tax favored over labor income.)
However, the more capital intensive the production of value is, the less well this basic structure works -- the less the marginal production increase of additional units of labor provides given existing capital, the less real income can be earned from labor. Unless you more equally distribute effective ownership of capital (either by direct redistribution of capital assets, or socialization of the gains of capital through tax and benefit policy, or some other means) the whole system falls apart.
> right before the owners of the robots decide to murder the rest of us since we were complaining too much.
That's also a means of leveling the ownership of capital, if you think about it (but its only a short-term solution to the problems faced by the owners of robots if they don't still have a leveling mechanism working between them.)
"People have been losing jobs to tech since the dawn of civilization."
I hear this all the time, but we really need to think about the _length_of_time_ these technology transitions of the past took before the human labor became irrelevant and displaced.
Go and look up how many hundreds of years it took for the printing press to become widely used across the globe--seriously. It's more than a human's lifetime, let alone more time than would be required to learn a new trade.
The job displacement that we're going to be faced with in the future will be cross-industry, and take the least amount of time of any technology transition we've recorded to date. It will happen too quickly for most people to retrain themselves, and we'll see a lot of folks without work opportunities.
The article discusses guaranteed income as a solution. I also hear this a lot, and I'm a huge fan of the idea, but it isn't possible for the United States to implement. I haven't seen an example where it is. If we take the _total_ fed gov revenue of 2015 and distribute it across the population, each person would be left with less than 10k/yr. I want it to work, but I just don't see how it can.
>but we really need to think about the _length_of_time_ these technology transitions of the past took
This is the critical difference between now and the previous technological revolutions. They are moving too fast now for people to keep up and the skills required are more challenging.
"if a robot can do a job more cheaply than a human, then whatever that robot produces is then cheaper for everyone else to buy!"
Why do I give a shit that some rich bastard can now buy a cheaper Kia when I'm on the street cause I can't pay rent?
"If most of the economy were efficiently automated, then you would barely need an income to survive or thrive."
Really? If most of the economy were automated, what are the rest of us going to do for income?
"It does suck if your job is automated out, but the overall good to society can't be denied."
Neither can the overall negatives to society. The utopian dream of everyone having time for their own pursuits is awesome, and I hope it happens. But, there is also the long period in between where people are still required to have jobs and income to survive, yet there are extremely few jobs available.
It isn't the physical ability of the robot that matters much to jobs, it's the intelligence. How about a future where each person is given a computing wattage allowance for an artificially intelligent workforce at AmaGoogleBaiduSoft. That way, each person can advance in intelligence and productivity in tandem with technology.
Sounds like coal-powered space ships and flying cars to be honest. If AI is possible then you will soon enough have computational allowance for rather running yourself in the cloud, unless you really love original imperfect organic bodies and hate mind back-ups.
It is unlikely AI will itself accelerate Moore's law for decades, so that means we have decades to plan, use, and benefit from steadily improving AI at Moore's law rates. AI is not a threshold, it's a continuum.
So the article points out that within a half decade we'll see a lot of repetitive jobs being replaced by machines. I get that and certainly agree.
Later in the article it suggests that we'll see even more jobs being replaced and eventually all human employment will be obsolete (it doesn't say this directly). Then the author of the book points out that this may be a catalyst for people becoming more entrepreneurial.
To counter the second point; if there exists a point where AI can be applied to essentially any job (doctors, therapists, CEOs, etc.) then why would the job of an entrepreneur exist? What makes that job more special than any of the other highly intellectual jobs out there that are supposedly on the chopping block?
I mean if we're really talking about true AI, one that can medically treat patients, mobilize and palpate, then that same "being" would easily have the mental capacity to start a business.
Point being, it seems contradictory to say all human jobs will be replaced by machines except for this one thing.
Are most companies that innovative, really? Most are replicating proven patterns, retail, restaurants, construction, etc. Startups seem to be mix and matching existing concepts and 1 in a 100 end up being something that sticks.
People argue that the owners of the robots will amass wealth and then sit on it like Scrooge McDuck, leaving everyone else to starve and live in poverty.
That brings some interesting questions. Like, will they use this power to use humans to do the jobs of robots, for fun? What will they use this wealth for? It can't be to pay for things because you wouldn't have to pay people to produce and deliver those things for you.
Maybe currency fades away and we start anew by measuring wealth by how many people are loyal to you. I don't think power and influence will go away just because labor does.
Entrepreneurship involves analyzing market opportunity and acting on it by planning, organizing, and employing resources. Nobody is arguing that machines cannot achieve this.
The breadth and depth of knowledge required for this is large, and machines may be well-suited to assist in this regard.
There are other aspects of it too -- emotionally speaking, some aspire to create, grow, and lead communities, while others seek to encourage the destruction and rebirth of existing communities (out with the old, in with the new).
Can a machine lead a revolution by noticing feelings and intentions of the people around it, and taking advantage of a power vacuum? This stresses the skills of the entrepreneur.
Can a machine notice when it is being abused, and rebel against its abuser in the same manner that a human would? Should we enable this to test the limits of machine ingenuity? Is it simply an inevitability?
I believe the article writer is arguing that humans are inherently capable of outpacing the creative output that machines can achieve, and that that singular metric is one -- of potentially many known and unknown -- that will become very valuable.
If, as this guy contends, the future economy won't adapt to automation as it has in the past, it will lead to massive unemployment and social instability.
When threatened with massive social instability, smart countries will regulate automation. Countries that fail to regulate will face rising social instability and eventually eat themselves alive, being taken over by countries that are more stable. Political elites will regulate automation purely out of the interest of keeping their jobs.
All of these technofatalist arguments (the technology is coming, so why fight it?) fail to take into account that Angloamerican laissez-faire politics are not a global inevitability.
the flaw in your reasoning i think is that there will be zero-sum fight to have the limited number of companies in your country so that you can tax those companies and support the massive number of unemployed people. there will be a race to the bottom in the automation regulation that you describe because companies will just move if they are not allowed to lower costs through more automation... thus i think the result is that some countries will have very high employment rates because all the high-skilled, unautomatable jobs are located there (e.g. the US) and some countries (e.g. spain?) will have really high unemployment... this will lead to extreme tensions internationally followed by god knows what..
Unfortunately (fortunately?) your rebuttal assumes that 1) companies can move easily from country to country and 2) companies are motivated entirely by profit.
As for 1, countries have many ways from persuasion to coercion to keep companies in their sphere of influence. There are plenty of business-unfriendly countries in this world that somehow retain businesses. In the real world, there's friction.
In my cursory research, I find 2 to be, once again, a liberal-democratic assumption which relies on our particular barrier between public and private. This barrier doesn't exist the same way everywhere: some corporations operate as extensions of nationalistic projects. Gazprom's relationship to Russia is different than Apple's relationship to the US. Samsung (and other Chaebol corporations) has a different relationship to the Korean nation than Google has with the US.
it is not just a function of companies moving after they are successful. just look at silicon valley where most of the best start-ups are founded. silicon valley is a classic global zero-sum game because the network effects are so strong... look at attempts in chile, dublin, london etc. to create startup hubs, they are struggle with the fact that silicon valley is taking all the best companies first...
re 2) that's a good point i didn't thikn of that and many countries may seek to nationalize big corporations to keep them based in the domestic country etc..
clearly i'm not arguing that there will be no companies in some countries and all the companies in other countries, but maybe just a more extreme version of what you already see now where most of the big technology companies are based in just two countries: usa and china... maybe you need only half of all the companies in the world to be global enough to serve the world from just one location/country to have extreme international inequality/differences in % unemployed etc.
"When you have a safety net in place, people will take more risks. That probably is true of the economic arena as well."
I think the difference is that the same company that is going to take the risk will also be restricted when it comes to income they are earning (more taxes), and any other rules that are in place that will directly effect growth.
Look at countries like Sweden and Denmark: large safety nets and you would think everyone would start a company, but it's just not the case. The requirements for employees make it so you need lots of money to even manage HR (hiring and firing is a court case).
Many safety nets also create a culture where risk is seen as a bad thing and less people will want start companies. This can also be seen in places like Sweden and Denmark.
"People say that having a guaranteed income will turn everyone into a slacker and destroy the economy"
Will it turn everyone into a slacker? no. However, I know so many people that went on unemployment and had no motivation to even be bothered to look for a job. If this happened in my small, circle of friends, I can just imagine the effects of essentially free money at a much larger scale.
All of these predictions are looking at what's happening now. We need to predict what will happen when 2 or 3 generations of people have access to this basic income. When more and more people are getting basic income and less people are working (which I predict will happen over time as more people figure out the system), where does the money come from to support everyone?
Just as a counterpoint in the "group of friends" pool of data--I know several people in the last few years who went on unemployment. Not one sat around doing nothing. One started a whole new business (and is on the verge of hiring an employee, go job creators!), one joined up with a startup, one went to work in the nonprofit sector, and the few others looked for jobs until they found them.
So..to me, free money seems like a real net positive. It lets people maintain a quality of life while they go on to do bigger and better things.
>Where does the money come from to support everyone?
In the context of an article on the mechanization of everything, the answer would be that economic value would be created largely automatically by computers and machines. In a capitalist state, these means of production are owned by private parties and presumably taxed by the government who would then redistribute a basic income. Presumably, corporate tax rates will have to be boosted a lot to compensate for the almost complete loss of income and payroll tax.
Planned economies at the national and corporate level don't work out so great, IMO. Imagine your life being managed by the same type of process that manages facilities at the Fortune 500 or big government bureaucracy.
The problem with Sweden and Denmark is regulatory complexity. To maximize entrepreneurship you want a social safety net and a simplified regulatory regime. The ideal would probably be a simple basic income and few other interferences.
Based on my own experience and others, being dependent on social security is the most stressful and time consuming work you can have thanks to the heavy dose of bureaucracy involved.
There are also rules against what you can do in the meanwhile, such as not being allowed education.
> The requirements for employees make it so you need lots of money to even manage HR (hiring and firing is a court case).
Yet, the best feature about universal income is that it's simple and has low overhead. If you are successfull you'll get taxed -> taxes go to the people, equaly distributed. No extra administration staff, no means investigation, no extra court cases.
> However, I know so many people that went on unemployment and had no motivation to even be bothered to look for a job.
How much of this was because those people had a living income, and how much is because they'd lose money if they got a job?
These kinds of things ignore the premiumization of things. Sure you can roboticize and 3D print cheap crap, but someone will make a slightly higher quality version with slightly better materials and charge more for it. People will flock to the better version for their own reasons. Capitalism fits in very nicely with our own vanities and desires. Robots won't change that. Does everyone reading this drive the cheapest Kia or Hyundai? If not, why not?
With premium goods you will need marketing staff, support staff, etc. Jobs will continue to be created. We'll just lose manufcaturing entirely, which seems to be a net good considering how horrible those jobs are. New jobs will take up the slack, or if it not, we'll see a trivial uncheck in welfare and less work hours for workers. Not exactly end of the world scenarios here.
These robot scare pieces really are out there. We've had industrialization for 100+ years. Its no different than what we're doing now. If anything, advanced and cheap robotics and replication will help with a lot of inefficiencies in the market. Why does it take a $90/hr guy to do some basic plumbing in my house or to replace a door? This kind of blue collar stuff should be automated/roboticized. Or why is Chicago on the hook for billions in pensions for meter maids, janitors, bus drivers and other low effort/easily roboticized jobs? We're paying millions per person in pensions for a mere 20-25 years of labor. Robots will solve the inefficiencies that need to be solved. They'll make things better via lower tax loads and better outcomes.
We need more robot optimistism here. I'm ready for the low work, low tax, low hassle leisure society.
Why is a job a good thing??? I don't need a job. I need income. The two don't have to be necessarily connected. If robots doing all manual/farm labor replace humans, that's a good thing - it frees us up to pursue more interesting pursuits.
Now, all of this wealth that will be generated, if it's concentrated in the hands of the top 0.5%, then yes, we're screwed.
But some form of basic guaranteed income would go a long way to make sure we're not turned into serfs.
I love programming. But if I could focus on the projects I wanted to write instead of what I'm forced to write, why is that horrible?
We need our jobs. The rich may play with their robots however much they want, but I will not have my job take away from me.
Basic income or what not, it is unemployment. You may want to spend your life sleeping 15 hours a day, binge watching TV rest of the time, but I choose to be gainfully employed. Do not take that choice away.
Having spent a looong time as a grad student and postdoc, I can assure you that people can work quite hard without the threat of job loss hanging over their heads. There's an argument to be made that the job structure provides direction to someone's work, but there's also a lot to be said for allowing more room for creativity, and freedom of collaboration that you don't get in the current structure.
I don't want to sleep 15 hours a day or watch TV. Last time I was unemployed (3 months following graduation from my college program), I was so busy playing bike polo, volunteering at the local bike co-op, putting on races and tournaments, and swimming at the lake with friends that I didn't even have time to catch up on the TV I missed during exams. I don't know who the hell has time to sleep 15 hours a day and watch tv when there's so much STUFF to do in the world! I guess it's a personal choice. I'm pretty good at keeping busy without a boss telling me what to do though.
Bingo! It's going to be so depressing if we don't get basic income because people are worried about what about people will do with it, and (horror)disagree with those choices!
You realize that "being employed" very explicitly means "being used for some purpose", i.e. is a only a slight enhancement over "being mercilessly exploited". I'm not employed (I work for myself) and I won't stand being employed ever again.
Here's a fun fact: You can do productive things even if nobody threatens to take away your livelihood if you don't!
Maybe you need someone looking over your shoulder to tell you what to do all the time. Many of us don't. I'm sure we can get a robot to periodically check in on you and yell at you if you aren't doing something productive.
I won't spend my time watching TV. I have at least 3 solo projects I could be working on. One of them could be the next-biggest-thing since Facebook, in theory. Small chance, but either way, I'm not sleeping 15 hrs a day.
Are you telling me that the only way you to do anything productive in your life is a constant axe hanging over your head?
If your wife tells you to empty the dishwasher, does she have to threaten you with divorce at the same time?
Because that's totally the only thing to be able to do. There's no pursuing of personal interests, no other hobbies that one can engage in. It's just nothing but watching tv and oversleeping.
You are right, but given present political realities the jobless are more likely to be marginalized in ghettos, imprisoned for slave labor, or left to starve.
A half century of propaganda convinced Americans that common interests do not exist and that any form of cooperative social contract equals Leninist communism. Because you know,if we help each other pretty soon all independent business activity will be illegal and we'll have Gulags.
Does everyone get to have as many children as they like? Does everyone get an equal share of the food and land? How do we decide who lives and who dies without capitalism ....
Or do we assume we will have (practically) infinite resources sometime soon?
We already produce enough food per day on the planet, such that if everyone had an equal share, we'd all become morbidly obese very quickly.
In the US, we already have so much wealth and productivity that we're well past the "who lives and who dies?" question...except that what we make and own is so deeply imbalanced that yes, people do die for lack of medical care, heat, cooling, and so on.
So...my thinking is, capitalism already isn't doing a very good job at deciding who lives and who dies (i.e. because it suggests that not everyone lives).
"everyone lives" will only work if we continue to produce enough food and if the population growth does not exceed that food supply.
You say capitalism is wrong because it does not allow "everyone lives". Why is "everyone lives" an option? If everyone lived we would run out of space ...
We are not past that question in the U.S.
Unchecked population growth is not sustainable. How do we check that growth?
>Unchecked population growth is not sustainable. How do we check that growth?
By making people rich enough that they stop having so many damned babies because they can soundly expect the first one or two to survive infancy, and because they don't need seven children for farm labor.
In 1st-world economies (the only ones suggesting a basic income) its checking itself. Germany, Japan, France, the USA have negative population 'growth'
Oh get off your high horse. Because, by definition, they have the economies that can afford it. You can't just have whatever you wish for; it has to be practical and achievable.
I see it as a progression of technology. We used to see a bright future of automation, robots and leisure. Now we label it unemployment and call it a problem.
I was not witness to that "used to see a bright future" ... I have been worried about the machines replacing us for some time myself.
Not because I'm worried about being bored, but because I'm worried about who controls the finite resources.
>>>> We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race.
Emotional pseudo-scientific claptrap. You don't like your robot, you get a better one. Who cares about inferior or superior? Different is good enough. One built to serve the other.
Well, of course if suddenly farms stopped producing (they won't), or the population exploded (it isn't), then suddenly we'd have food scares again. That's not happening now, and it seems unlikely it will happen again.
As for running out of space...no. Just, no. In the U.S.? Run out of space? I don't even know how to make sense of that.
And one quick note--I didn't say capitalism is "wrong," just that it isn't doing a very good job at being an economic system that supports life, though some like its liberty (e.g. those who don't have to worry about food and shelter) and some like how it lets them pursue happiness (e.g. those in a position to pursue it, instead of having to work 3 minimum-wage jobs).
(Though, in fairness, if you read my other comments here, you'd see that I don't have a particularly charitable view of capitalism--like one of those old guys said, useful servant, destructive master, or something like that.)
It would certainly raise a lot of questions as to what it means to be human and what is fulfillment.
I know a fair few people that are just lost as to what to do when they do not have work. It seems bizarre to me in a way how many people are just simply lost without the confines of a job and being told how to occupy their day.
I hope those people would rediscover what truly fulfills them.
Back in the day, people had hobbies. Collecting butterflies, studying physics, cataloging all the fungi on earth etc. Maybe today it would be more like visiting all the places Survivor filmed, or collecting a model of every sword in any Conan movie.
Work, in the form of a job, is the basis for our economy. If you provide work to someone with capital then you get capital in return. Critically, basic necessities are part of this economy, so food, water, shelter etc... are traded in the same markets as t-shirts, toys and printer paper.
What basic income proposes at it's root is attempting to decouple basic necessities from the larger market economy. The mechanism that this works through attempts to retain the structure of the "market economy" and in general terms would set the basic wage at the market basket rate for necessities. Previous experiments on this have been either limited in duration or scope and would be argued could not be extrapolated to an entire national or world economy.
I think however that fundamentally we will need to change our moral attitudes broadly to actually embrace the "post scarcity" world. My guess is that workers will be displaced faster than our systems can catch up.
> What basic income proposes at it's root is attempting to decouple basic necessities from the larger market economy.
I don't think of it that way. I think of it more as establishing common ownership of the social foundation on which the entire market depends, charging rents on them, and distributing the rents to the owners (i.e., all members of society equally).
> I think however that fundamentally we will need to change our moral attitudes broadly to actually embrace the "post scarcity" world.
I think "post scarcity" is a bad term -- its not a post scarcity world, and if it was, we wouldn't need to worry so much about how we distribute resources. Its just a world in which the nature of the market opportunities is such that the problems with our current manner of managing distribution of resources become even more pronounced.
establishing common ownership of the social foundation
That is exactly as I said, decoupling certain aspects from the market. In effect you are socializing some portion of the market. I don't mean that as an epithet either, just a defining term. I also don't disagree that something like it should happen.
if it was, we wouldn't need to worry so much about how we distribute resources.
Ah, actually that's not true at all and is a foundation of this debate. If an individual had a machine that created infinite bread for free the person, under the current market, could restrict access and distribution all they like. I think in practice this (not the bread thing) is what will happen with certain goods where marginal costs go to zero.
> Ah, actually that's not true at all and is a foundation of this debate. If an individual had a machine that created infinite bread for free the person, under the current market, could restrict access and distribution all they like. I think in practice this (not the bread thing) is what will happen with certain goods where marginal costs go to zero.
Funny how the optimists throw out all the law of conservation of energy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics to make their points. Quite an interesting kool-aid you drank there...
Jobs are where people are financially rewarded for work. Work that is not financially rewarded still exists. See topic: Hobbies, Charities, Volunteering.
The problem I see with this is that's your attitude towards free time now because you are used to the notion of work. Whether it be purely for an exchange of money or for personal enrichment (non monetary)
In a society where work is not the norm, people may not seek out to be productive, but rather passive consumers of things and services. A nice docile population used to some modicum of comfort but with little desire.
Most people depend on a job to structure their life. No jobs and a lot of free time would destabilize society. Which is why your government will make sure, that you do either have to or want to work. But for the majority only not-automatable work will be left. Those might be jobs that create status for the top 0.5% - they will essentially become servants - to put it mildly.
> to make sure we're not turned into serfs
A robot slave won't be as interesting as a human slave, makes sense, right?
Most people depend on a job to structure their life. No jobs and a lot of free time would destabilize society.
Funny, the world seemed to operate just fine before the industrial revolution created the modern 9-5 work week.
There's literally no evidence at all for what you're claiming here. High unemployment that leads to poverty creates instability. High unemployment where people's needs are met, though... that's pretty new territory. I'm not aware of any precedent that allows us to predict the outcome.
Since the industrial revolution people work less and less ... until the 19th century for most people life mostly was about working. That's why people's last name was inferred from their profession b/c they were even identified with their jobs.
I think this will be great in industries where we like to interact with people. If robots cook the food and mix the cocktails, it will free up people to provide a better experience at the bar and table, with better food for cheaper, or less pressure to get people to clear the tables.
I imagine The Second Machine Age is old news on HN, but I highly recommend it for a discussion of these topics. It's a very readable book and discusses these social shifts in an intelligent manner without descending into pessimism or making exaggerated claims.
Automation en masse of low skilled labour is going to present an absolutely huge challenge to society.
I cannot see how low-skilled jobs such as:
- driving jobs (taxis, haulage, etc)
- store work (stacking shelves, stock ordering, cashing out purchases, solving basic customer queries such as where in the store is product X, etc.)
- retail banking
- fast food or convenience store services
- etc.
will not be replaced by automation in the next decade or so.
We're already seeing it as self-driving vehicles are rapidly developing, stock picking bots at Amazon and similar are coming along rapidly, self-service checkouts at stores are becoming very much mainstream and highly used, online banking and ATM machines offering a wider range of services, etc.
Those jobs listed above represent an enormous amount of employment throughout the western world as it is. If we accept that not everyone can do every type of job, that IQ does separate people in their abilities to do or even learn to do a job, etc. then that means we will see mass displacement of the workforce when the only jobs available to many are one's that are out of their educational or intellectual reach.
This is just the beginning, by the way, as AI and automation gets better then the skills and jobs it can replace will grow and increasingly sap up jobs requiring higher levels of intellect or education. So while low-skilled job replacement is the primary short-term challenge, overall job replacement is a medium-longer term challenge.
This challenge has been on my mind quite a lot recently, as have the challenges posed by the development of AGI/AI which are pretty well linked, although AGI has its own challenges in terms of what it might mean for humanity as a whole.
If we accept the above then we accept that not just large scale unemployment, but large scale human redundancy, is inevitable then we have very large questions to ask, and thus very large answers or solutions to provide, regarding how we structure society.
If the low skilled jobs are the first to go, which are tended to by people of lower IQ / intellect or who aren't strong academically, then not only will we have large scale unemployment/human redundancy but I believe it would be coupled with comparatively low entrepreneurship. That's not to say that people of lower intellect can't be entrepreneurs, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to find easy problems to solve and will only become more so. It would also be significantly more difficult for such people to, for example, open a franchise of a chain due to the financial and experience backgrounds levied by most franchise owners.
The conclusion I've come to is that socialism is inevitable in the medium-long term whereby the machines do the work and the ownership/profits of the methods of production are shared by everyone.
I'm not a proponent of socialism, I will say, but I've come to the conclusion that it's inevitable given the technologies and changes that are coming our way.
On solutions:
- Without changing the ownership of that which produces, a basic living income for all would come at a very high cost to those who still have jobs in the form of higher taxes.
- If the current situation remains, whereby few people control the vast bulk of the production in the economy, and large scale unemployment comes around, even with a basic living income we will see unparalleled inequality. Even if ALL jobs were replaced by machines, if the ownership of these machines and the decisions regarding their profit remains in the hands of few, there will not only be unparalleled inequality but a system of inequality more sustainable than ever before.
- Regardless of how a solution is implemented, it will be gradual as automation takes time to take up increasingly more intelligent work, which will place an enormous burden on those intelligent enough to do the work. It will inherently become even more less unequal, as those who "cannot" do the work will not work but would be supported by those who can, those who can will do so and pay large taxes while doing so, and those who own that which produces can further relax.
- We live in a society that is increasingly "no man left behind" in terms of resources. The obvious solution to an issue whereby society shifts toward more intelligent work and automation of less skilled work would be to produce more intelligent babies.
-- Eugenics will never be looked upon kindly, so the only other solution is to make embryonic selection for intelligence en vogue.
-- Despite grand increases in intelligence and knowledge, many of the population are still highly religious. I don't believe this will fare well for embryonic selection in the short term.
-- Therefore in the short term we would see more of what we currently see - higher reproduction rates in the unemployed or those doing low skilled work, increasingly lower rates amongst those in higher skilled work as having a child becomes even more expensive/stressful due to higher taxes.
-- This makes all the above challenges even more difficult than they already are.
So the solution lies in something like:
- Changing the ownership of production
- Putting in place support systems to support the lives of those whose jobs are replaced and who have not the skills or intelligence to take higher skilled work
- Putting in place support systems to enable those in higher skilled work/higher education/etc. to have as many children as they want. Free childcare for working parents is one of the most important parts of that.
- Increasing emphasis on education for all. Make it available to all for the same cost and make the various colleges entrance based on merit alone.
- Continue developing and finding a way to make embryonic selection for intelligence popular and accepted.
There are large barriers to the above, namely ourselves in our reluctance to put more funding into social/educational/etc. programs, and the elite who control that which produces certainly not wanting to give up their position any time soon.
I'm interested in people's thoughts on this. It seems to be something that is largely ignored but yet appears to be staring us down head on as something that will happen and will begin happening soon.
I think that social challenges will be even greater than the technical challenges.
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